July 8, 2009
Do the math.
On Hacker News on Monday, I was amused to read some people saying that writing StackOverflow was hilariously easy—and proceeding to back up their claim by promising to clone it over July 4th weekend. Others chimed in, pointing to existing clones as a good starting point.
Let’s assume, for sake of argument, that you decide it’s okay to write your StackOverflow clone in ASP.NET MVC, and that I, after being hypnotized with a pocket watch and a small club to the head, have decided to hand you the StackOverflow source code, page by page, so you can retype it verbatim. We’ll also assume you type like me, at a cool 100 WPM (a smidge over eight characters per second), and unlike me, you make zero mistakes. StackOverflow’s *.cs, *.sql, *.css, *.js, and *.aspx files come to 2.3 MB. So merely typing the source code back into the computer will take you about eighty hours if you make zero mistakes.
Except, of course, you’re not doing that; you’re going to implement StackOverflow from scratch. So even assuming that it took you a mere ten times longer to design, type out, and debug your own implementation than it would take you to copy the real one, that already has you coding for several weeks straight—and I don’t know about you, but I am okay admitting I write new code considerably less than one tenth as fast as I copy existing code.
—Benjamin Pollack, The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News, July 1, 2009
(Via Daring Fireball & Kottke, jointly making this 99.9ºF on Fever)
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3 Responses to “Do the math.”
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I take it you got the Fever situation worked out. Also, I loved that whole thread.
No, Fever’s still fucked up, but I spent an hour or so laboriously (it times out each time I click “submit,” and then I have to reload the whole page) blocking most of the junk URLs that were making the “hot” page useless.
I’m sure that writing Fever was hilariously easy; I should just redo it myself, to fix the goddamn bugs.